EMC fullfilling its hunger for security with RSA?

Summary:When I talked to EMC's Mark Lewis a few weeks ago, he said that his company's next hole to fill through acquisition was in the security space. According a New York Times report, EMC is in the running to acquire RSA Security for $1.

When I talked to EMC's Mark Lewis a few weeks ago, he said that his company's next hole to fill through acquisition was in the security space. According a New York Times report, EMC is in the running to acquire RSA Security for $1.8 billion. That would bring the total acquistions for EMC in the last three years to 30, totalling nearly $6.5 billion. "Most security today focuses from the outside in–we are going to focus from the inside out," Lewis said. "You don't get rid of perimeter protection, but you've got to build vaults to protect the data," Lewis, EMC's chief development officer, told me. He also said that EMC would pursue more of a "string of pearls" approach, focusing on smaller companies. Acquiring RSA would be a faster and more bold way to enter the security market. EMC products can certainly benefit internally from RSA's products, such as adding digitial certificates to Documentum and data encryption to the storage devices, but the big win is in treating RSA like it has VMware and Documentum post-acquisition--giving them the resources to grow as distinct business units, while leveraging sales channels and teams.

At the time of this writing, I couldn't access the EMC web site. Not sure if there is any causal relationship between the rumored acquistion and the site being inaccessible, unless all the RSA employees are pinging the EMC site at the same time...